This is the tale in which Ireland's gods fight for the country and win, and it is much stranger than that summary suggests. Two of its four or five most memorable scenes are not battle at all: a poet ruins a king with eight lines of verse, and a god is force-fed porridge out of a pit in the ground. The text seems entirely aware that these are the good bits.
A king with one hand, and a king with no manners
The Tuatha Dé Danann had taken Ireland from the Fir Bolg in an earlier battle at a different Moytura, and had paid for it: their king Nuada lost his sword-arm in the fighting. Irish kingship law is unforgiving about this. A king must be physically unblemished, because the land's fertility is understood to run through his body, and a maimed man cannot hold the office. Nuada stepped down.
The kingship went to Bres, whose name means beautiful and whose mother was of the Tuatha Dé while his father was a Fomorian prince, Elatha — a compromise candidate meant to keep the peace with the sea-raiders. He turned out to be the worst possible kind of Irish king: mean. The text does not accuse him of cruelty. It says that the knives of his household were never greased, that no man's breath smelled of ale after visiting him, that his poets and harpers and jugglers and fools were never seen performing, and that the great men of the Tuatha Dé were put to labour — Ogma hauling firewood, the Dagda digging earthworks for a fort. In a society where a lord's worth is measured entirely in hospitality, this is worse than tyranny. It is disqualification.
Then the poet Cairbre came to visit and was put in a narrow dark room with no fire, no bed and no furniture, and given three small dry cakes. In the morning he stood up and composed what the tale calls the first satire made in Ireland: a compact curse about no food on the dish, no milk to grow a calf on, no shelter in the dark, and no prosperity for the man who gives them. Red blotches rose on Bres's face. A blemished king cannot rule. He was deposed by a poem.
Silver arm, and the doctor who murdered his son
Meanwhile Dian Cécht, the physician of the Tuatha Dé, made Nuada an arm of silver that moved as a living arm — which is why he is Nuada of the Silver Hand. It was not quite enough. Dian Cécht's son Miach, with his sister Airmed, went further: they took the old arm, set it against the stump, chanted over it joint to joint and sinew to sinew, and grew flesh across it in nine days.
Dian Cécht's response to being outdone by his son was to strike him on the head with a sword. Miach healed the first blow, and the second, and the third; the fourth cut through the brain and killed him. From his grave grew three hundred and sixty-five herbs, one for every joint and sinew in his body, and Airmed gathered and sorted them on her cloak according to what each one cured. Her father shook out the cloak and scattered them, and that, the tale says, is why nobody now knows the full cure for every ailment. It is the bleakest aetiology in Irish literature and it takes about a paragraph.
The man who could do everything
Bres, deposed, went to his Fomorian father, who told him his claim was unjust but sent him on to the war-leaders Balor and Indech, who were happy to raise a host. Nuada, restored, called the Tuatha Dé to Tara — and while they were feasting, a young man arrived at the gate.
The doorkeeper's rule was that no one entered without an art. The exchange that follows is the most famous audition in Irish literature. He was a wright — they had one. A smith, a champion, a harper, a warrior, a poet and historian, a sorcerer, a physician, a cupbearer, a brazier — and each time the answer was that the household already had a man for it. Then he asked whether they had anyone who held all of those arts at once. They did not. That is how Lugh came to be called Samildánach, skilled together in many arts, and Nuada handed him command.
Lugh then went round the company asking each of them what they would personally contribute — a scene that reads like a war cabinet minute. Goibniu the smith undertook to replace every broken spear-head with a new one that would never miss and would leave a wound that never healed; Credne the brazier the rivets and hilts; Luchta the carpenter the shafts. Dian Cécht undertook that any man not decapitated would be back on his feet the next day, put through the healing well of Sláine with the right incantation over it. The Dagda offered to do the work of all of them with his club. The Morrígan said what she would do to the enemy, and it was not medical.
Porridge, and a goddess in a river
Two set-pieces sit between the planning and the fighting.
At Samhain the Dagda met the Morrígan at the ford of the Unius in Connacht, standing astride the water washing herself, one foot on either bank. They lay together, and she told him where the Fomorian host would land and promised to take the blood of the heart from the enemy king. The place is still called the Bed of the Couple.
Then the Dagda went to the Fomorian camp under truce, and they decided to make sport of him. They dug a pit in the ground, poured in eighty gallons of new milk and the same again of meal and fat, and put in whole goats, sheep and pigs, boiled it, and poured it in — and told him he would be killed if he did not finish the lot, because the Fomorians did not want to be accused of stinginess. He took a ladle big enough for a man and a woman to lie in together, ate the porridge and the gravel underneath it, scraped the pit with his finger, and lay down to sleep with a belly the size of a household cauldron. Then he walked home in a filthy tunic that did not cover him, dragging his club so that it cut a track behind him deep enough to be a territorial boundary, and on the way had an encounter with a Fomorian girl that begins as mockery and ends with her promising to work magic against her own people on his behalf. This is a god being made ridiculous by his own worshippers, at length, with relish, and it is the strongest evidence anyone has that the humour in these texts is deliberate.
The battle, and the eye
When the armies met, the kings and chiefs were supposed to stay out of the front rank; Lugh escaped his guard and went in anyway, chanting round the host on one leg with one eye shut, in the posture of a curse. Nuada was killed, along with Macha. The Fomorians worked out that their dead were not staying dead, tracked the healing well and filled it with stones, and the tide of it began to turn.
Then Balor came forward. His eye was kept shut by a lid that took four men and a polished handle to raise, and whatever it looked at lost the power to resist; the tale explains it as an accident, the fumes of his father's druids' brew catching him as a boy. As the lid was lifted, Lugh put a sling stone through it and drove the eye out through the back of Balor's skull, so that it fell among the Fomorian ranks behind him and destroyed them instead. In the tradition preserved in Lebor Gabála Érenn, Balor is Lugh's own grandfather through his mother Ethne — the story of the tower, the prophecy and the twelve babies thrown into the sea belongs to nineteenth-century Donegal folk tradition rather than to this text, and it is worth keeping the two apart.
Bres was found alive and unguarded on the field, and bargained for his life. He offered that the cows of Ireland would always be in milk; refused. He offered a harvest every quarter of the year; refused, on the grounds that spring, summer, autumn and winter already have their proper work. What was accepted, and what saved him, was practical advice on the right days for ploughing, sowing and reaping.
And the Morrígan went to the high places of Ireland to proclaim the victory — and then, in the same breath, prophesied the world's end: a time of summers without flowers, cattle without milk, women without modesty, men without courage, forests without mast, seas without harvest, and an old age of evil. The great victory tale of the Irish gods closes on a vision of everything running down.
The manuscript situation, honestly
Cath Maige Tuired is a much thinner textual survival than its fame suggests. The main version depends essentially on a single sixteenth-century manuscript, British Library Harley 5280, in the hand of Gilla Ríabach Ó Cléirigh. Its language is mixed: a core that linguists put in the ninth century or thereabouts, worked over in the eleventh or twelfth, with later interpolations sitting visibly on top. Whitley Stokes edited it in 1891; Elizabeth Gray's 1982 edition and translation is the standard one. A separate Early Modern Irish version exists and tells the story differently.
Lebor Gabála Érenn — the "Book of Invasions" — covers the same events, but it is Christian pseudo-history built to fit Ireland into biblical chronology, and it flattens the gods into a wave of human settlers. Where the two disagree, they are not two versions of a myth so much as two different projects.
Questions this tale raises
Are the Fomorians the pre-Celtic natives of Ireland?
That reading was standard in the nineteenth century and is now abandoned. It rested on treating a mythological text as a garbled folk memory of ethnic conflict, and on an etymology — fo-muir, "under sea" — which specialists generally reject in favour of a second element meaning something like phantom or monster. Within the tales they are not a displaced native population: they intermarry with the Tuatha Dé, they hold Ireland's tribute, and Bres is half of each.
Is the three-function reading of the tale sound?
Georges Dumézil and his followers read the Tuatha Dé as a textbook Indo-European society with sovereignty, martial force and productive craft each embodied in named figures, and the battle as the assimilation of the third function by the first two. It is elegant and it has been influential, and it has also been criticised for finding a structure that the analyst brought with him. Read it as one lens, not as the tale's meaning.
Where is Moytura, and is anything there?
The Second Battle is placed at Moytirra, on high ground east of Lough Arrow in County Sligo; the First at Cong in Mayo. There are cairns and megalithic tombs on the Sligo site — and they are Neolithic, thousands of years older than any story told about them, in the same way that Newgrange is far older than the gods later said to live in it. This is the normal relationship between Irish monuments and Irish myth, not an exception.
Why does a satire actually work?
Because in early Irish law it was not a metaphor. The poet's satire, áer, was a recognised legal instrument with recognised harms; unjust satire was itself actionable, and blemish raised by satire was treated as real injury. Cairbre's verse against Bres is the mythological charter for a professional power that poets in Ireland held into the seventeenth century, and it explains why so many Irish tales feature people conceding to poets rather than arguing with them.